Sixth Grade & The Teacher's Room

We sit shoulder to shoulder at the cafeteria tablesno ordinary school lunch—the cooks are all motherssome of them ours, everything from scratchby women who can cook—to say no thankseven to the soup is a problem. Today it’s rice,floating white and curved among green fansof parsley, bright carrot chunks, caughtin a savory broth, when Mr. Hinz callsour attention to the similarity betweenthe cooked kernels and the hookwormswe’d been discussing just before lunch.We girls, edgy as beveled glass, screech.Some reach for ketchup as if to drownthose worms, but even then how like an intestine—the squirted stream, beginning to bleed intothe urine yellow, growing as formless as a futurewhere nothing can be thrown away, all of it comingtogether in stamens with anthers and fertilized pistils,like sixth grade science where everything is like somethingelse, no innocent berry or cucumber, all a similefor something we have yet to learn.

Students entering the sixth gradewhen this table was already old butfirst covered with the now-rattyblue and green and shreds of yellowcontact paper, have since led full livesas janitors, printers, Viet Nam vets,clerks, professors, grandparents…